El Jefe (jaguar)

El Jefe is an adult, male Arizonan jaguar. He was first recorded in November 2011, and is living in the Santa Rita Mountains. From November 2011 to November 2016, El Jefe was the only wild jaguar verified to live in the United States. His name, which means The Boss in Spanish, was chosen by students of the Felizardo Valencia Middle School of Tucson, in a contest organized by the non-profit conservation group Center for Biological Diversity in November 2015 and has been used frequently by conservation groups and media. However, several researchers involved in his monitoring prefer to call him simply the Santa Ritas jaguar.

El Jefe was first sighted by cougar hunter and guide Donnie Fenn, along with his 10 year-old daughter, in the Whetstone Mountains on Saturday, 19 November 2011. His hunting dogs chased the animal until he climbed a tree, at which point he took several pictures of him and left to call state wildlife officials. In a news conference organized by the Arizona Game and Fish Department the following Tuesday, Fenn stated that the jaguar, an adult male, climbed down the tree and was chased up a second tree after he had injured some of the dogs in his retreat. The hunter pulled his dogs away, and left the scene. The pictures represent the first evidence of the existence of a wild jaguar in the United States since the death of Macho B in 2009. Several news outlets ran the photos with an article but a video, said to have been taken at the scene, is not publicly available.

In 20 December 2012, through a joint news release the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Arizona Game and Fish Department and the University of Arizona, announced that pictures from a jaguar taken in late November of that year, at the Santa Rita Mountains using camera-traps, belonged to the same individual photographed by Fenn one year earlier. The camera-traps were set by the Jaguar Survey and Monitoring Project an initiative led by the University of Arizona. Individual jaguars can be identified by their unique spot patterns, which allowed researchers to confirm it was the same adult male.

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